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JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 
[Vol. 16 
Mr. C. L. Metcalf: I should very much prefer to listen, but I 
don’t like to see these questions go by without more discussion. 
In definite answer to this question, I should say that in my opinion 
the way to make the structure of insects interesting to a student is, 
first, to make the active , living insect mean something to him. The average 
student in college is interested in a subject in direct ratio to its answer to 
these three questions: What relation does it bear to his past experience; 
what obvious relation does it have to his anticipated future; and third, 
is it in itself directly interesting or attractive? 
I think we shall have to admit, most of us, that the study of the 
structure of dead, more or less decomposed insects, is not in itself very 
interesting to the average non-specializing student of entomology. 
Therefore, we must make the most of the other points. 
I have tried in the last three years in my teaching of beginning courses, 
the simple expedient of beginning the course in a way that hooks up, I 
think very nicely, the work of the course with the students’ previous 
experience with insects. 
No student who comes to college can have lived as much as five years 
in America, I think, without having had some definite vivid experience 
with some living insect. By the time he becomes of college age, he has 
had probably several such experiences. 
The first period in my course I have therefore devoted to the simple 
and somewhat superficial diversion of making the students tell me 
something that they already know about insects , and I make them write it 
on the board. I shouldn’t say “make,” because they get into the game 
and a little rivalry soon results in a blackboard full of interesting things, 
ranging all the way from fights with bumble-bees to spraying for the 
codling moth. This little thing connects up the student’s past experi¬ 
ence with entomology, and makes him feel that entomology is not some 
form of discipline forced on him by a hard-hearted faculty, but a live 
subject dealing with a common and important phase of his environ¬ 
ment. 
In the second place, the relation to his anticipated future is some¬ 
thing that can be taken up best by the method suggested by Dr. DeLong; 
by giving a comprehensive survey of the relation of insects to human 
welfare. In fact, much against the judgment of some of my colleagues, 
I have been turning the thing around, putting the cart before the horse, 
they think, in the beginning courses in entomology, by having the first 
course not a course in structure or classification of insects at all, but a 
course in the relation of insects to human welfare. In the first course in 
